CurPay Co-Founder Chris Curtin Talks Crypto & The Future of Alternative Payments | FinTech Friday | B2B Vault: The Payment Technology Podcast | Episode 139

Yo, what's up everybody? It's Justin live from B2B Vault, the payment technology podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by that guy in the corner, the Steve Jobs of merchant services himself, Allen Kopelman. And today is FinTech Friday. Yeah. So yes, and in honor of FinTech Friday, uh, we got our first guest of the year, Chris Curtin, uh, co-founder of CurvePay. I'm super excited to get, uh, more— get to know Chris more and to learn more about his company. Uh, he's got a lot of stuff brewing, stuff cooking up, man. Excited to hear about all the new stuff and, uh, his take on the state of cryptocurrency in 2023. Uh, so yeah, man, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. Um, so yeah, let's just get right into it, man. Allen, what you got to say, dude?

So we're, you know, I've known Chris and his business partner Ted for a while, you know. We became acquainted and we started talking about crypto, and then, you know, crypto's gone on a roller coaster ride. So, you know, today even a story came out and, uh, about Visa stands by crypto and the other, you know, card brands. Everybody's, you know, still— I think people are still bullish on something going on with crypto. So, Chris, uh, tell us a little bit about, you know, CurvePay and what you know, CurvePay, you know, what you guys see happening in the future for crypto.

Sure, man. Well, first and foremost, thank you guys for having me. I enjoy your show every Friday. FinTech Friday is a staple for us. Um, CurvePay is built on our core technology, automated volatility protection, to balance out the volatility of crypto, right? So CurvePay, built on adoption and the education piece. Is enterprise software for both trading and merchant payments. Um, what we see, what you just mentioned, you know, Visa stands by their crypto. I have a saying that the tsunami of crypto is coming, whether, you know, whatever's going on right now, the big companies are building the rails behind the scenes so that when it comes, they're just going to turn it on and it's in your face, ready to rock and roll. So we talk in those circles, right? We can see it coming. If you see a lot of the companies working today, you can see they're building the methodologies and they're teaching their users how to use crypto already, but not just saying, hey, this is crypto. Um, it's coming. Just that we hope that everybody can be proactive enough to see that. Uh, you know, now we have the little roller coaster like you said, but crypto is a big space. So if you can break it down into micro pieces, there's a lot going on.

And what do you think, what do you think about like the government? You think the government's going to come in and do some, you know, have some regulation or some rules?

I do, you know. So crypto is like the Wild Wild West. It's like a lot of things, right? It's like the internet back in the early days when it came out, a lot going on. We come from another industry which is, you know, was the Wild Wild West, and you see that everywhere in the sports betting industry. It's regulated and licensing and everything else. What just happened with our friends up in the Bahamas kind of, you know, really put things into a tailspin. And with regulation comes these bigger companies like you mentioned, Visa, MasterCard, American Express. When the government says this is what we require you to do in order to process payments and/or use crypto, it just opens the doors immediately, right? It gives it legitimacy.. And we're hoping that they can do that realistically and in the, in the, um, spectrum of us being able to operate, right? Not to come in and clamp down on it so hard that now you're just pigeonholed, but the ability to say, okay guys, this is what we see that should be the regulations, and then allow people to build out from there.

What were— so I don't know if you, you caught that podcast when Allen and I were talking about, uh, the regulations in Japan. What's your thoughts on that? Do you think that we should, you know, the way that Japan has their regulations, you think that the U.S. should kind of piggyback off of them and kind of use that same system?

You know, I, I think that everybody's looking for the first country to blaze the trail that actually has a working model. You know, if, if they can adopt pieces of that and then mold it to America itself, then yeah, why not? You know, if you don't have to reinvent the wheel and you can, you know, follow somebody else's lead, sure, do it.

Indeed.

Yeah, I think it's important that the consumer has a safe place to store their crypto, and that's like the Japan model, because the crypto is being stored and watched over by two entities one being a bank and then the second one a government agency. And that way we won't have another FTX where somebody raids the— raids the cookie jar that they should have their hand in.

So on that piece, if you talk about that, you're talking about in the trading sphere of having it on an exchange or whatever. You could bring it into your own ledger, you could have it in your own wallet. There's many different methods of people that It depends on what piece of crypto you're looking at. So right now you talk FTX and what they've done to the industry. With great power comes great responsibility, and they kind of messed that up for us. But if you look at crypto, crypto is trading, crypto is merchant processing, crypto is holding, right? So if you can break those pieces apart, if it isn't an exchange, yes, what you spoke of, if it is in your wallet and you hold the keys to that, then it's your own personal to do whatever you want with. There's all different revolving doors in that, right?

Right.

And what do you think about that?

I just want to ask real quick.

Yes, sir.

What's your thoughts on NFTs? You know, the NFTs and, and the Web3?

And so what— NFTs, uh, I like them. Some people don't like them. You know, there's, there's different models for that too, right? So we've been— we were in talks with people. I'm a triathlete, and we were in talks with, uh, agents of triathletes that were going to NFT off their pro athletes, like their bike where you could buy the NFT of that or buy a piece of their, uh, personality kind of deal. That works in that aspect, right? Digital art is a big piece. We saw that OpenSea and all those kind of things was hot for a time. Some people think it's a fad. I think it has a place. I just don't think we found that place yet, right? So, right.

Yeah, I agree. I think the utility part of the NFT is, is going to be huge for companies. Once, once, once the— it's adopted by the masses, I think that, you know, we'll be able to see how you— NFTs can really be used in the future.

Yes.

Yeah, we talked to a company recently that wanted to do an NFT for a, for a vineyard, and then you would get the NFT as part of a package of receiving wine each month. Okay. NFT would give you access to their special events and, you know, get a visit to the winery and different things like that. And I think that's the VIP pass.

It's a— that's like, those are great practical items for that, that use case, right?

Yes, absolutely. Yeah.

And, you know, the thing is, is like, now a lot of those companies want to accept credit card to pay for those since the value is more on the goods and services versus NFT as a vehicle to make money, right? Where it's, you know, so that's pretty interesting. It's going to be interesting to see how a project like that, what the percentages of people who purchase the NFT with a credit card versus who purchases the NFT with existing crypto, right?

And so like, if you think of that, that's consumer piece, you know, you're gonna need to want— you're gonna have the masses to say, I am willing to do this for you, right? Where the other way of, if you're doing a purchase, there's people out there that want to buy something that are going to use their crypto, right? So yeah, there's two pieces to that, right?

So, and what do you think about all, you know, like we've, we've talked, you know, so me and Chris have talked about Allen Kopelman and his business partner Ted about alternative payments, right? And the launch of— there's several alternative payment platforms that are trying to get up and running, you know, in the US to bring alternative forms of payment like pay by bank, pay with crypto, pay with different wallets. And, and different things like that. And do you think that's going to help cryptocurrency get out there to the businesses and amass, um, you know, like, being more adoption because it's part of a whole package of alternative payments?

I do. I think that, you know, if you're going into a company that has that reach already, it's PayFast. Payment companies that are just piecing everything together. You want to use YZ, please just button here. I do— that is true because it's going to give you the ability to say, hey Justin, I have credit cards, I have, uh, digital wallets, I have crypto. For him to just say one day, I'm going to turn crypto on for the sake of what— to see what happens, right? I think that definitely helps. It helps in the fact that companies that are starting out in the crypto space as a provider, your— the scalability is easier that way, which you spoke of, rather than going merchant to merchant to merchant.

Right. And, and what do you think? Do you think that, um, you know, what do you think? Like, do you think like there's going to become a day where someone's going to walk in with crypto and pay for a burger, or do you think that in the beginning, like when we were processing crypto, when it was like sky high, right?

Yes.

Everything was a luxury item. Boat rental, VIP to the club, VIP experiences. People were paying for vacation homes, like insane amount of people would drop $100,000 a week in Bitcoin, paying $100,000 a week in Bitcoin to rent like a luxury yacht or a home. I mean, it was pretty crazy, you know. People were dropping money on cars and everything like that. These things like that, that's going to be the staple. Or do you think that maybe down the road we're going to see something like USDT become like a digital— like the, like the digital dollar, and people start to move these digital dollars around?

Yeah, I hope not. I hope that the US dollar token does not You know, I, I'm all for like it being decentralized. I want it to be what it was meant to be. I don't want it to be controlled, you know. I think that there needs to be regulations, but once you start turning it into a regular— then it's just currency again, and then it's— yeah, it's not what it was meant to be, right? So I didn't mean to interject, but I just wanted to—

no, no, that's great.

Yeah, that's what it is. It's both sides of the coin. Like, what— which side of the coin, you know? How deep is the government going to get into it, you know?

Oh, you know the answer to that. But the thing is, is that when you, when you talk about cryptocurrency in the form of a method of payment, right? So it depends on the value of it. Bitcoin, you look at Bitcoin's something that you want to hold on to, the gold standard kind of deal. Ethereum the same way. I do. So to answer your question, yes, I do believe that somebody's going to be walking in and then in the very near future paying in crypto for burgers. They do it already, um, at many locations. But when you're talking about— when you were talking about paying for like young luxury things and Bitcoin and everything else, you look at it as a, um, not an item that is not, uh, going against you. So if you want to— if you took your credit card or you went to your bank account and you took out $100 grand, you feel that, right? If you're doing— if you're doing a crypto transaction for $100 grand, it's it's just boom, it's 100 grand of just a coin, right? The concept in my mind is that if you have 100K in Bitcoin, boom, there it is. Well, it's all right, I paid for it. It's not hurting your bottom line, kind of, right? There's a mental picture that way. Um, there will be a coin that peer-to-peer use that has not yet to be identified. A lot of people talk Ripple as the banking coin. Dogecoin as the peer-to-peer, you know, gamers are getting into— they have their own coin and paying for things that way. So you could see different verticals having different coins for methods of payment, or the, the communities adopting just a single coin and saying, okay, we're going to use Ripple and just pay for everything on a daily basis and then keep the other ones for asset value.

Right, because you kind of seen, uh, some, some companies doing that with Shiba She was real popular for a second. You started seeing like, uh, you know, little burger spots. I don't know exactly where in the world this was, but there was like a whole community that was pushing the Shiba coin to be used daily.

You'd about a million of them to pay for a burger.

But, but think about that though. So if you look at when you're talking about Bitcoin at $60K, to get one Bitcoin, not many people have $60K to just go drop on as one Bitcoin, right? Where you could buy a million SHIB for a couple hundred bucks and then you have that ability to spread it around, right?

Exactly, right.

Yeah, so that, that makes sense how it could be more used more as a peer-to-peer coin.

Like, yeah, I never—

I didn't think of it the way that you explained it like that, like top tier, middle tier.

Yeah, of course, it makes sense.

Yeah, I think that the— you know, now it's a lot harder for people to introduce a coin into the US market because there's definitely been some regulation on people introducing a new coin because there's been a ton of money lost on that.

Yeah, it takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of backing on it. I mean, there's tons out there right now, I don't— you can't even imagine. I mean, our trading software, we just do 4 exchanges and 2,400 trading pairs. That's a lot of coins that are out there floating around for people to dabble in.

So with all of this, like, you know, can you hear me good?

You— I can hear you again.

Yeah. Uh, so with all the, like, the, the nonsense with crypto going on, how did CurvePay pivot, you know, or, or did it change the business model, or, you know, is there anything that you guys are planning to do differently since, you know, all of this and the, you know, like, the negative outlook of crypto in a sense?

That's a great question. You know, when you look at— so it goes back to what I was saying before. Crypto is such a big space, right? So we have our two products built on the AVP. Is a non-custodial trader, right? So it doesn't affect us or at, you know, the exchanges we're in or are ones with a lot of volume. And Ted, my business partner, vets them pretty rigorously to make sure that the volumes are there, that everything's nice and tight. And then with payments, it's kind of, you know, that scare— that scare tactic of, well, crypto is bad because of what just happened. And if you look at trading, yes, right, that's, that's an exchange that's going to drive things down. Um, we're non-custodial, so we're kind of like, we, we have the AVP that allows you to protect yourself in a manner that by setting certain, um, requirements within the admin, it would sell off at proper times and have you the ability to buy back in. So an accumulator. So this is a great time to use the trader piece. And from the merchant side of things, we look at it, we have a seamless-to-consumer risk-free-to-merchant, right? So we go direct to fiat. So as a merchant, you are— you can offer 60 coins to your consumer, okay? And then we handle the lift and then pay you back fiat, right? So there's no— the only person that is subject to what just happened in the industry would be the consumer, because they're the ones willing to give up the amount of coin that it costs to pay for the item. The merchant themselves is still going to get their, their value of their product regardless of whatever is going on in the market. If you're selling a $100 pair of sneakers, you're going to get your, your fiat less the fees for that item, right? And it's up to Chris or Justin or Allen to say, I'm willing to give you X of this asset for that $100 value. Right? And then you know that if you're, if you're in the crypto, uh, sphere and you hold crypto in a wallet, you know what you're giving up at that point, right?

Right.

And what do you think about like the Bitcoin ATMs that are out there? What do you think?

I love it.

I love it.

I think it's a great way. So education and adoption are the only way these things are going to grow. One is education. Without the education, people are never going to adopt it, right? Right? So you use an ATM on a daily basis. Bitcoin's not that much different. And if you're saying— if Justin says, hey Chris, I have some Bitcoin, what's Chris going to do, right? Word of mouth and buddy-buddy is gonna— I'm gonna go want to get some Bitcoin. Where can I get it? Head down to the ATM, slide a $20 in there, and get your little piece of Bitcoin, right? Now you, you have it, and then that's where everything begins, right? Your venture into the cryptoverse.

Yeah, I remember when I, I remember I first moved down to South Florida and I walked into this a little bodega on the corner by the beach, and I seen it and it said Bitcoin. And I was so curious, so I, you know, I walked in and I started asking questions. The owner didn't know what I was talking about, you know, he just bought it, that's it. Um, but yeah, I think that it's going to get very, very popular here soon.

Come— yeah, and you know, it's kind of now is when everybody should be like being proactive and getting ready for everything to come around. Uh, the Bitcoin ATMs It's perfect for people to either transfer and/or accumulate. Uh, they're growing. I know that in South Florida and up north in the New York area, you know, all that is starting to blossom. So, right, as people hear the buzz, and in the very near future they're going to be everywhere. Just like a cash ATM, there's going to be a Bitcoin ATM right next to it. It all depends on the rules and regulations, right? So Um, I watch BitAML, I watch Joe Ciccolo's thing, uh, feed all the time and see the rules and stuff that are coming out on that. They're becoming a little bit stringent, which is good. And I think that, um, in the very near future, it's crypto is the new method of payment all the way through.

Yeah, a couple of the Bitcoin ATM companies recently are in a little bit of hot water because they were, not doing KYC on the, on the people buying the Bitcoin on the machines. Yeah. And there was a little bit of hot— there was a little bit of, uh, rub on that.

But you know, I think anything new, there's always going to be friction, right? Until everybody fine-sands it. Everything's gonna— everything's gonna come and be like, well, you didn't do this proper. Okay, what do we need to do to fix it? And then by each incremental step by the time it's full rollout, it's clean. Everybody's happy, you know, the regulators are happy, the owners are happy, the people that are buying are not overly infringed upon when it comes to the KYC stuff. But, you know, with crypto comes a lot of that KYC, AML. It's just part of the, part of the, the business, right?

Yeah, like me and Justin were at an ATM show and it was, you know, it was— there were, there were, you know, standalone Bitcoin ATMs there, and then they were also showing how these small sidecar machines to get hooked on to existing ATMs. Yeah, that we're gonna not just enable ATM but enable all sorts of transactions to go on on the ATM machine. So like, you know, these companies have where you could go up and pay a bill, you know, you could— you know, we talked to a company that had where you could cash out your crypto on the ATM. So essentially you could cash out some crypto and then pay a bill with it. Or maybe even pay a bill with your crypto while you're standing at the ATM and become more of a function of, you know, like a financial hub. You know, the ATM is more of a financial hub, just a place to take money out or put money in.

It's incredibly smart that they're doing that. If you think about what's the fastest way to get to go, if there's an ATM machine, you can build an add-on to it Why build a whole nother machine when you can just plug in, right?

Yeah, that's what I was— like, when I see those Bitcoin machines, that's what I think too, because they're so huge. They're like huge. Yeah, like they took up the whole corner of the store that I walked into, and that's what really caught my attention, because not only was the sign that big, but like this machine was, you know, the truck is back in there. But yeah, man, that's super cool.

Yeah, I've seen a couple of massive ones, massive ones of those Bitcoin ATMs. Doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but it probably has a big safe to hold the cash that people are—

yeah, exactly, exactly.

So it's, you know, it's an interesting part of the, you know, the business. You know, I've been in the payments space for over 20 years, so it's always interesting to see, you know, these alternative payment methods. And they pop up. And then, you know, how they work out, like, you know, just like, you know, the whole discussion about pay by bank. Do people want to do pay by bank or stick with credit cards? The people going to pay with crypto or stick with their credit cards? And, you know, alternative payment methods are going to come into the, come into the space, and they're, they're going to grow because it's only natural because younger people, younger consumers are going to, you know, go, you know, start to use the different alternative payment methods. And we saw that during, you know, COVID, people started going into the, you know, using things like Cash App and these different, you know, Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, you know, and then all those companies, especially Zelle, is in big, big, big hot water now. And a bunch of regulation came in on to those companies. So it's going to be interesting to see how it all plays out. But I think for a business, one of the things that's going to be important is to be using an alternative payment platform so that all their alternative payments are aggregated together.

Yes.

And then comes in in one payment versus how can you deal with getting payments from all these different players, right?

Right. And that's kind of like when we, we deal with, uh, third parties and, uh, strategic partners, we allow you to settle back and it's ACH, credit card, crypto, boom, all together, right, in one settlement, like you said. And you touched on a great point. Crypto's so— the tsunami of crypto is coming. That's my, that's my go-to phrase, right? And the generations are the ones right behind us. I mean, you look at that stuff, they're on the phone, is the, the new ATM, it's the new bank payment, it's the new everything. And if you look at some of the bigger companies, and I, you know, my favorite example is MasterCard. If you look at a lot of MasterCard stuff these days, they're doing, they're doing card not present, they're doing scan QR. And what's the first thing that you do with crypto? Scan QR. So if you're, if they're teaching their people how to do that already, all they do is turn crypto on and boom, there they go, they're full across every sec, every segment of the business.

I think one of the big things that's going to come up soon is there's several lawsuits going on against Apple and Google in regards to the phone hardware.

Yes.

And so one of them was— one of the veils was already cracked because in the new phones they put the NFC readers in the new phones.

Okay.

And now it's cracked because originally Google and Apple were not going to let any payment companies be able to use that technology, right? They were like, no, we're not going to let anybody use it. And then that, that wall came down right away, right? Now there's quite— there's 3, 4 payment companies or more building, um, tools. So I mean, we have one probably coming out the second quarter of this year. You'll be able to come up to somebody's phone, they could pull up a transaction tap your credit card on it or tap your, you know, bring your phone close and make a payment. And the other thing that they're all fighting about is the wallets, right? What the, you know, wallets while getting wallets, alternative wallets on the phones.

Yes.

And, you know, that's going to be, I think that's going to be a major deal with alternative payments because once everybody, um, companies like, let's say your debit, let's say you bank at a certain bank ABC Bank, right? And soon, if that wall comes down, that bank can put your credit card in your— into that app, and then you can just walk up to a machine and, you know, oh, I'm gonna pay with my ABC Bank today. Tomorrow I'm gonna pay with my XYZ. Tomorrow I'm just going to take out my crypto app and pay with my crypto. You know, those kind of things, that's what's going to bring all of this forward. Is cracking that— cracking the, um, the wallet, you know, the wallet getting cracked open. Yes, everybody be able to put wallets onto the phones, and that's going to really, you know, open the floodgates up for all types of different payments to come into the market. And merchants are definitely going to need to have an alternative payment platform. You know, we're working with working with, you know, a couple of companies right now on, you know, how are they going to board that, what does the reporting look like, and things like that. So they could have customers walking in. Justin comes into my store, he pays with, uh, you know, PayPal. The next guy comes in, pays with a Cash App. The next guy comes in, hits a Venmo. Chris comes in and pays with his crypto, you know. And having that, you know, all organized into a dashboard so that the merchant can reconcile their books not get multiple deposits. I started in payments so long ago, merchant would get one deposit from Visa, MasterCard, one from their PIN debit, one from American Express, one from Discover, one from Diners Club.

Right.

Yeah.

Doing all of that, like in a restaurant or retail environment, you would get 5 deposits coming into your bank account. A lot to reconcile. Today you accept credit cards, you get one deposit for all credit cards. So it's going to be really important, you know, for companies to develop, you know, these alternative payments into a platform like that so that the merchants— and also, you know, because the banks aren't going to like it if you're going to get like a gazillion deposits into your account. Yeah, they're not going to be happy. So it's going to be important for that to, you know, to work. That's why the bank— the banks are pushing community banks, credit unions, you know, even the larger banks want to get there. They, they want to be able to have their wallets on in people's phones, you know, because they don't want— well, they don't want to pay Apple whatever because Apple's collecting a fee. I don't know about Google. Google was collecting a fees. Apparently they don't collect it from everybody, you know.

So what's your thoughts on, you know, what is the CurvePay's plan moving forward for 2023 as far as, you know, crypto payments? Is there anything like you guys want to make an announcement about, or, you know, some that just— you're something that you're really pumped about?

Man, so yeah, 2023, we're kicking it off. We're, we're deep into our MTL journey at the moment, you know, direct to merchant. What's cool about us is we, we fit into any vertical, right? So we go direct to merchant, pizza shop, sneaker shop, uh, we go agent, ISV, ISO, you know, anywhere you can fit us in. We have a huge, uh, invoicing piece that we just put together that we have in the system for recurring invoicing. So if you need to blast invoices Um, you know, that's big for us, pushing that. And we're also going into the trader part. Traders right now is where everybody needs it, right? In order for the recap of what just happened in twice in the last year, right? We got thumped really bad in the last few years. We've, we've, um, reduced our pricing models so anybody can come in and give it, you know, one trading pair and then five trading pairs and up. Allow you to protect yourself against the volatility. Um, so those are, you know, we're just trying to be out there helping people, you know, I want to say protect themselves, but also to, you know, help guide them and give them the education piece, you know, where that there is something out there, that not all crypto is bad, you know. And if it does drop like it does, there is way— there are ways to protect it, right, using our—

I was just gonna ask You know, so for someone, someone who's coming in, you know, like for myself, like I don't have a, you know, a ton of money, my portfolio isn't this, you know, a lot. What, what are some ways someone like myself could, you know, maybe set myself up for the tsunami?

So, so, and on the— so there's the two pieces, right? So the trading piece depends on, you know, your appetite for volatility. Obviously, if you have something in an exchange, um, you want to make sure the thresholds are low. We— with our product, you can set that so that at a percentage drop, it's gonna— the machine learning will take a look at it and analyze a trade for you. And if it is the proper time, it'll sell it off. It could hold it for a little bit longer, and then once it does sell off and the price drops to where it should be, the AI will buy back in for you, sort of accumulate the coins, right?

Um, all right, I need to— I feel like I need to do a rewind here. So what exactly does CurvePay do for your crypto?

Okay, so we have patent-pending technology called Automated Volatility Protection, right? It protects you against the drops in the market. There's two different ways to look at that. Some people say, well, that's just a bot, right? So bots and machine learning are two different things. A bot is pre-programmed, right? So, and if you see a bot, they do 3 or 4 coins because it's a guy behind the scenes saying, okay, if bought Bitcoin, do this if something hits X, right? And then it's going to incrementally just sell off every time it hits X. Well, with our AVP, if it hits a percentage that you set to your risk threshold, it'll go and sell it. It'll say, am I making the right decision at this time? If it says yes, boom, it's going to sell it. If it says no, I think that it's going to go down a little bit further, it'll wait and then it'll sell, right? So it's constantly thinking. And then what's going to happen is the next time— so there was a sell, it's going to— next time it hits that marker, it's going to go back and say, did I make the right decision on that previous sell, right? And then it's going to determine by itself, hey, I think that we can hold on to this just a little bit longer to ink out a little bit more, um, revenues, right? And what's also great about the EVP is that it's not an— it's not a sell on an accumulative number of buys. The AI is going to take an individual sell and then go match it against the buys that it has done over a period of time. So each sell and each buy is going to be matched up perfectly for you to maximize your return.

One of the things, one of the things me and Justin always talk about on the podcast is, you know, financial education. So sometimes we talk about financial education, you know, personal financial education for business is most of what our topics are about. Like, oh, you're going to start a business and, you know, what do you need to know, you know, from the financial standpoint of, you know, forming a corporation, getting bank accounts, getting a merchant account, you know, um, you know, using accounting software and all these, you know, different pieces, right? And then, so are you got, you know, and then, you know, also like we'll get merchants, you know, when crypto was on fire, we would get merchants, they would come to us and they go, oh, you know, we need some, you know, we don't know anything about crypto, give us some crypto education. And we did a few podcasts and some of them were more like webinar style. You know, we did like—

not an expert at crypto, right?

We're not an expert on crypto, right? Right. We probably don't want to be giving financial advice either, so that's fine. But we were more or less explaining like, oh, you know, your customer comes in, you're selling an item for $1,000, they want to pay you with Bitcoin, and this is what happens, right? So we kind of explain like the process of that. But are you guys getting involved? You know, and I just went to a convention like called Financial Brand where there it was all banks. And one of the big subjects they were talking about there at Financial Brand was, you know, the lack of financial education, you know, the lack of understanding from people like what does it require? How can I get myself a good credit score so I can get a credit card, so I can get a bank account? So I can get a mortgage, so I can get a car loan. You know, what is, what is that, you know, what does all of that look like? And, um, you know, what, what does that look like from a financial education standpoint, right? And are you guys doing anything, or do you guys, are you guys planning on doing anything to provide some like crypto, you know, education? Because that's one of the things when we talk to people, they're like, well, I don't understand crypto. And a lot of people blindly, you know, like, oh, uh, the Dallas Mavericks are going to accept Dogecoin, and everybody runs out, buys a Dogecoin. Or what was that? AMC movie theater is going to take Shibu Inu, right? The Shibu coin, right? And then everybody's running out buying AMC stock and buying Shibu coins. And then I forget, there was something else going on with the, the Shibu thing, and then You know, and then like a lot of whatever they call them, the meme, meme coins, the meme coins, right? There's tons and tons of them out there, right? And, um, you know, I really think that there's like a lack of, a lack of, you know, financial education on all levels, you know, in high schools and, you know, for young people to learn about financial education. Even, you know, banks are trying to teach people financial education. I'm trying to do— give people, you know, we've done a few podcasts where we educate about, you know, how to, you know, financial education for business. So where can people get financial education on like crypto, even like buying stocks, right? People don't know like how does the stock market work, the bond market work, you know, how does a CD work, you know. How does crypto work?

So, Chris, let him answer, please.

I know, yeah, I get it. So there's a lot of educational sites out there— CoinDesk, Crypto News, uh, Cointelegraph. Uh, there's a lot of financial— not, you know, informational crypto sites that you can go look at on the internet. Does CurePay have any, um, roadmap for that? Yes, we were just talking here, Q2, Q3 webinars. Kind of like, this is how you use our software. Um, when it comes— if you're entering the crypto market, you need to do research. It's like with anything, stocks and bonds, crypto is the same thing. They're, you know, it's what you can put into it. Be sure that you can afford that kind of deal. So it's the same thing along the lines, stocks and bonds. Um, but yeah, CurePay does look to do that. The merchant piece is pretty straightforward. I mean, you know, everybody's in that industry. Kind of gets that part, right? But when you come to the trading piece, it's a little bit more intricate. I was not a trader. My partner is an avid trader. And when he came and said, hey, listen, we're going to put CurePays in the market, I was the guinea pig on that. And then if I can do it, anybody can do it kind of deal, right? So once you get in there, it's first finding what you're interested in, your, your appetite of what you can, you know, get into as far as coins go. Finding an exchange that you're comfortable with, that has reputable backing behind it and all that kind of stuff. Um, and then would be to find a product if you're gonna not just hold it and ride the wave of the volatility, that you're also comfortable with, right? That has some, some backing behind it and some people that know what they're doing in order to help you with your money market strategy.

Yeah, one of the things I'm bullish on in with crypto. And I'm— and still even today, like, you know, if a merchant came to me and said, hey, I need to do a bunch of international transactions, you know, because I always tell people, you know, we see a commercial on TV and they go, oh, Visa, MasterCard, American Express, the global economy, right? I tell them, yeah, that's a global economy until there's a chargeback. So when there's a global economy, if you're sell— like, I'm in America, right? Let's just say Justin is in Brazil and then wants to buy something from me. If I take a credit card from Justin and he wants to do a chargeback, literally, you have no— there's no protection. Visa, MasterCard are not coming to the rescue on that. And that's where I come— and that's where I talk to merchants about. And I go, you know, for those transactions, you need to really look at crypto, because the other alternative to crypto is, you know, doing a SWIFT transfers and bank transfers and these international wires, which you get very expensive. Plus they can take days and days and days to clear into your bank account, right? Because you get a— Justin sending me a payment from Brazil, he's got to do a currency exchange, then it's got to go out to another bank. You know, like the, the whatever, the Central Bank of Brazil, because Justin's in Brazil today.

Yeah, right.

That's, that's a big piece. Cross-border payments is massive.

And I think, I think that, like, I think that could be the thing that, you know, should it be attracting merchants today, is that, you know, if you want to do cross-border payments, you know, you've, you've, you should be seriously looking at crypto because it's very, very safe. Plus the people I see, like in Europe, when I talk to clients— I deal with a lot of clients in Europe. Sometimes I have to wake up at 4 or 5 in the morning for a Zoom meeting, which can be a little bit annoying. Sure, like I'm totally awake, you know, to be on the call with them. And, uh, you know, we'll be talking and they tell me about crypto that, you know, about like they're doing crypto transaction, a lot of crypto transactions in there with their B2B stuff because they just, they know that it's safer for them. You know, nobody can do it, you know, there's no chargebacks, they get their money right away. And it's very interesting how even over there they'll tell me, they're like, oh, people will go and they'll get like a stablecoin and hold the stablecoin, and then as soon as they're ready to buy let's say $20,000 worth of goods from them, they'll go buy the Bitcoin and do the transaction like right away. They're not going to the, to the Bitcoin to do that. They have it held like either in cash or a stablecoin, and then they're swapping it out for Bitcoin and then running the transaction out.

You'll probably see that a lot, and you'll probably see that go into the banking, right? So that's Ripple., you know, moving that kind of, uh, weight around through the banking system in order to get mass volume of mass transactions quickly to, to, like you just said, to you or to Justin, or Justin vice versa. Um, here, Allen, here's my money, and within a minute you know that you have it, right? And then you could send the goods the same day. There's no the gap. You mentioned it with the payments, right? With Swift, it's a 3-day thing, and then it's getting it shipped and packed and ready to go. If Justin's a good customer of yours and he's going to send you a stablecoin and/or Bitcoin, you know, the next time he calls, you could have that stuff packed and ready to go on the dock and then it's going to go out to him that day.

Yeah.

And you're not worried about him doing a chargeback either.

Exactly. No, it's not possible.

People don't even realize with wires, with ACH, with SWIFT payments, someone can reach back and go into the bank. Of course, they got to cause like, you know, they got to go shake the earth, right? Yeah. If you're transferring around, you know, $50,000, $100,000, you know, that's why I was saying like we had some guys in jewelry businesses and they were selling jewelry from, you know, United States to Israel to Brazil to Colombia to here to there. They were doing it all with Bitcoin.

Yeah.

You know, it was all being done with— it was all being done with Bitcoin.

It's just the beginning.

Yeah. And I think that that needs, you know, the luxury— not the luxury, but I think the cross-border is like, I think that's going to be the— that needs to like kick back up again, you know?

Yeah.

And the US merchants shouldn't be so scared of it because they can get fiat in their bank account. They don't have to worry about holding on to the coin. And we have a website that has—

that's our hook too. Sorry, Justin.

Okay, I said the old guard just needs to let go, man. It's okay.

Yeah. And that's the key with— so the CurePay way is that we give you your cash, right? So the merchant doesn't have to worry about any of that volatility or lift of off-ramping or exchange or anything like that. We just send— we just send you your cash.

Yeah.

So we have a website, npscoin.com. You know, they can come there, you can get signed up, and we get you hooked up with CurePay, and then you're ready to accept— you're ready to accept crypto at your business, no matter what kind of business it is. The invoicing piece is amazing. So you can send people an invoice and then they, they click on it and then they pay. And I remember I saw your guys' demo, was really cool. And, you know, then they can, and then if they're not ready to pay, they can come back to it later, click again. And that's like, you know, so hey, we've added a new one.

So since we saw it last, saw you, is P2P, right? It's, it's one line of code. You, uh, put it embedded in a button, click it, and then anybody can send you money through just a simple line of code. No tech needed, you know.

Wow, that's pretty amazing.

Yeah, right? So it's like a tipping function.

Oh, a tipping function.

Okay, well, man, we've been on here for about 45 minutes. Um, is there any final questions you want to ask him, Allen?

No, I'm good. Is there anything else you want to talk about, Chris? We hit everything.

Yeah, we did. And you know, it's, uh, we appreciate what you guys do. I mean, your show is amazing, giving, you know, you talk about education and people in the, in the marketplace, and you guys do that every week. So from us to you, thank you very much. You know, you're helping not only us but the others out there to get on their way.

Thank you, man.

All right, thank you. Thank you, Chris, for joining us today on B2B Vault.

Thank you.

We haven't done very many interviews, so we're kind of like working out like the format of how to do it.

It went really smooth today. I mean, the beginning was a little hiccup with the sound, but it went really good. The internet connection has been pretty good, so I'm pleased. I give it a two thumbs up.

You guys are amazing. Thank you very much for your time, and we appreciate it. Thank you for letting us be on.

All right, peace out, everybody.

See you later. Cheers.

Bye-bye.

Good Tech Friday.

Woo-hoo!

See you.

See you.

And the broadcast— Allen, thank you, sir.

Hello everyone. We'd like to take this time to thank our sponsors, Nationwide Payment Systems and NPS Printer. We'd also like to shout out the listeners and everyone that subscribed to our YouTube channel. Thank you for tuning in. If you'd like to reach Allen or myself, head over to B2BVault.info where you'll find two forms, one to contact us and another if you're interested in becoming a sponsor. If you'd like to sign up for a merchant account, click the Apply Now button located at the top of the page of B2BVault.info, where you'll answer a few questions, and you'll be on your way to processing payments in no time. The podcast is available on Spotify, iTunes, Pandora, and other popular streaming networks. Thanks again for listening.